This always seems to happen when I work here

[jedimaster91]

At <other other location> today. Reminder I'm a Nuc Med tech.

Schedules are there for a reason. It's so we techs have at least a vague idea of what to expect from our day. Granted, this is medicine, emergencies occur, and schedules go right out the window. It's hard enough without a scheduling department that is either A)Seriously incompetent, B)Actively trying to make our lives difficult, or C)Both. No amount of gentle correction nor not-so-gentle correction seems to be making any difference.

The doctors' offices aren't helping either. More and more of them seem to have this remarkable reluctance to tell their patients what's being done to them. Now, there are a lot of variables to consider such as does this exam involve contrast, does the patient need hydration (which takes for-freaking-ever), etc, etc, blah blah blah. It got to the point where <hospital> just told the docs to quit telling patients how long things were going to take because they always told them wrong and we had to deal with the fallout.

Which brings us to today.

Patient 1 came expecting one exam (CT), but had two (CT and Bone Scan). She was also claustrophobic and wasn't sure she'd have enough medication to get through both exams. She made it though.

Patient 2 wasn't even on my schedule. He was supposed to be downtown but showed up at <other other location> instead. His order said <other other location>, but scheduling apparently put him at the downtown facility. And because I have to order tracers from an offsite pharmacy, it delayed getting his exam done. Our branch of Cardinal is awesome and frequently gets our tracers to us in less than an hour. But if scheduling had done their job correctly, I wouldn't have had to order it late and the patient wouldn't have had to wait.

Crap like this happens throughout the system, but it seems to be particularly bad at <other other location>. It doesn't help that BossLady is all about accommodating this craziness. Frankly, it's one thing to work in a 2 minute CT scan, but I can't always get a tracer/cardiologist (cuz they always seem to want to add on a stress test same day -_- ) to make up for someone else's screw up.

GRAH!

[Kogarashi]

Patient 2 wasn't even on my schedule. He was supposed to be downtown but showed up at <other other location> instead. His order said <other other location>, but scheduling apparently put him at the downtown facility.

Ugh, I hate when that happens to me as a patient. Our city is fairly cramped, as far as space downtown goes, and our primary hospital (the only one our insurance covers) is fairly spread out. Because of this, there are four different places one can be sent for an ultrasound, all of them a 10-minute minimum drive apart from each other (and two of those are part of the same Maternal-Fetal Medicine department, despite being halfway across town from each other). And yet whenever I get an ultrasound scheduled when I'm pregnant and I ask where it is I need to go, the receptionist talks down to me like I should know already that it's at Location A, nevermind that the previous appointment was at Location C and the next will likely be at Location B.

And, on top of this, the number the health center keeps giving me for that department connects with one of the locations, which never seems to have my order, and has to transfer me to another of the locations to double-check the scheduling. No, there's no central call center to handle this, either.

[trailerparkmedic]

I thought of you today, Jedi. I was in the ICU so I went with my patient to his V/Q scan. We were the first ones of the day and while our patient was on the table, the techs realized something was wrong with their cameras and they had to reset the server. It took almost an hour to fix, so everyone's appointments were screwed up. I wandered off to find the bathroom and walked past the reception area, where some woman was yelling at the receptionist about being made to wait.

"But IIIIIIIIIIIII scheduled the first appointment on purpose!"
"Yes ma'am, but sometimes technical issues out of our control occur. We are also located in a HOSPITAL, so there are a few critically ill patients that need scans before yours. We will get you in as soon as possible."

[jedimaster91]

the techs realized something was wrong with their cameras and they had to reset the server.

I've had that happen to me before. On Day 2 of a 2 day exam and I had to do half of it at my location and send the poor patient to a different site for the other half. She was a real trooper about it, thank goodness. It sucks royally when the equipment goes screwy in the middle of things and you've got STAT studies that need to be done.